Human Trafficking & Prostitution: Global Prevalence, Gender Perspectives & Health Risks

During the last decades, sociologists and urban geographers developed a substantial corpus of studies on the spatial organisation of sex markets in the city, as well as on urban conflicts and exclusionary policies implemented by public authorities. So far, not as much has been done towards analysing how political communication and mass media construct the public figure of prostitution and the prostitute in order to support repressive and exclusionary urban policies. The first chapter intends to analyse the representations of street prostitution, and particularly of streetwalkers’ bodies, produced by public discourses fueling conflicts around the visibility of sex commerce in the urban space. It aims to show how, in post-modern space wars on urban battlefields where communities’ social, ethnic as well as sexual identities are at stake, sex workers are often targeted as a major source of concern and depicted as foreign bodies to be eradicated from what is perceived as a socially, ethnically and culturally homogeneous collectivity. There are a handful of programs that help women exit prostitution, but few have any rigorous outcomes. The authors of chapter two present the need for such programs and introduce a therapeutic intervention for women seeking exit from prostitution that assesses prospective outcomes. The book includes a commentary on the difficult assessment of prostitution from a German perspective.